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LEWISVILLE — In a few weeks, Amanda Ferguson will move into her energy-efficient dream home.
"It’s more than I ever imagined or dreamed it would be," she says.The 2,500-square-foot house on Timber Creek Drive in Lewisville is a so-called net zero energy house, meaning that it produces at least as much electricity as it uses. This house puts electricity into the power grid.It’s one of only a few North Texas homes that qualify for platinum LEED status, the highest certification of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program of the U.S. Green Building Council. It’s also a demonstration project for the Energy Department’s Building America program, which encourages energy efficiency for builders and homeowners."We like to call this a high-performance house with green products in it," said the builder, Chris Miles of GreenCraft Builders in Lewisville. "We try to build our houses absolutely, positively as tight as we can build them. They’re more energy-efficient that way." The house makes exceptional use of recycled products.To begin, the three-bedroom, 2 1/2 -bath home sits where Ferguson grew up.Ferguson and her husband, Scot Owens, moved back to Lewisville more than four years ago and moved into the house her parents built in 1969. Her parents had moved into a new house.But faced with remodeling an inefficient home that needed costly foundation repairs, the couple decided to tear it down and rebuild. New uses for used thingsFerguson said they will go from living in a house with no energy efficiencies whatever to having the latest products. Construction cost was about $150 per square foot."They brought the project to me when we were talking about what was the best route," she said. "There was no second thought that it was 100 percent yes. They did a phenomenal job." Architect Bill Peck in Lewisville designed the mid-century modern structure around a small grove and a small boulder in the back yard. One of the trees, a pine, was planted by Ferguson and her father, who died last year. The boulder couldn’t be moved when Ferguson’s childhood home was built 40 years ago, and it couldn’t be moved this time, so it became a courtyard feature.Now a patio, built of decking made in part from recycled grocery bags, wraps around it. Supporting the patio trellis are recycled natural gas well drilling stems. Miles said they cost about $1 a foot.Super-low electric billsThere are so many energy-efficient features in the house and they’re hard to tell that they are.For example, mulch used in the landscaping is leftover wood and other items used in the construction that were ground up, Miles said. "We didn’t take our waste to the landfill," he said.The bright lights in the house are made with LEDs, or light-emitting diodes; interior doors are filled with recycled wheat straw; kitchen countertops are made with recycled glass bits in engineered quartz; the garage doors are 85 percent recycled products; and the driveway is made with permeable pavers that let rainwater run into the ground between the cracks, rather than into the streets.
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